Firefox’s memory usage has been a known issue for quite sometime. But it didn’t really bothers me until few hours ago when I was about to update this blog. Yes!, it was extremely sluggish to the extend that I can barely type anything on the address bar!.

Well, I’m pretty sure it is outside the norm as I use the internet browser everyday. I was surprised when I checked the Memory Usage in the Windows Task Manager as illustrated below.  It indicates a spike in the Memory Usage!.

The use of 440k memory is too much for a supposed to be a light browser. It is still considered normal if your Firefox’s memory usage hits 50k to 100k, but not as high as 400k!. If my memory serves me correctly, I’ve just upgraded to the latest version of Firefox – 3.6 few days back. But if this is due to the upgrade, then why on earth I got this problem only today?.

Then I remembered something, a good lesson which I gained from over many years of experience in Information Technology. You may fix most of the application glitch cases by restarting your computer. Although this may sounds funny, I have resolved many software related issues by doing this.

I just restarted my notebook, relaunched the Firefox and the result – the memory usage dropped to normal range between 70k to 100k after couple of minutes of observation.

I believe what happened earlier was merely a ‘technical’ glitch and not because of the new version of Firefox is eating a lot of resources. But should you encounter this and my small tips here is not helping, you may want to follow the guide from MozillaZine.